But she worried about him. When he was hurt, or troubled, he had this way of hiding behind his own bluff size and jocularity. The jokes came ever thicker and faster. But Bill’s jokes, in Julia’s mind, were very much subject to the law of diminishing returns. He adopted a tone, in these moods. It was like listening to a skilful mimic, sometimes, impersonating Bill. His face took on a vacant cast and he responded to what you said to him with a bland, avuncular energy. He was Good Old Bill in these moods, and what made it all the more insulting was that he seemed to think nobody noticed. When it was so obvious! Julia thought that even Natasha saw it, and she was only six years old. ’Tasha did adore Bill, she truly adored him, and Julia thought she could see disappointment eclipse the joy in her daughter’s face on those occasions when she would open the door to the godfather she loved and instead greeted Good Old Bill. The persona, the use of it, troubled Julia deeply. She sensed it was nothing more than a bandage wrapping and, at the same time, concealing a wound that refused to heal.
His house was in Laurel Canyon. It was built in the modern style from slabs of concrete and huge panels of opaque glass. The floors were polished wood, softened by the occasional rug. The furniture was all of a theme and the theme was coldly modernist. Bill had not taken a single artefact from the home he had shared with his first wife, Lucy, after her death. He had had the place razed and donated the land to a hospital trust. Everything from the home he had left for the one in Laurel Canyon belonged to the ex-wife who still lived there, in some splendour, on the beach at Malibu. I didn’t like the beach anyway, Bill would joke, at the loss of real estate and expensively accumulated art. I never wholly trusted the tides, he would say. And he would wink.
So now he lived here. Water cascaded through the artful tiers of his garden and tonight it was lit by a procession of paper lanterns placed on either side of a meandering path. Guests mingled inside and out. The volume of talk, the abundant laughter, suggested the night was a success. Julia thought it was. At first she had been blind to all but the sparkle of Cartier necklaces and Balenciaga gowns and the drowning exclusivity of scents by master perfumiers spreading in aromatic waves from warm and wealthy flesh. The men wore their money more discreetly, in Rolex watches on gold bracelets and cufflinks set with diamonds and emeralds and studded with occasional pearls. She saw lizard-skin shoes and, on one man, the silver belt buckle of the Lone Star State. There were familiar faces there, of course: movie star faces she had disciplined herself before arriving not to gawk at like the popcorn-munching matinee fan she sometimes was. Bill’s guests were an eclectic mix, the one common denominator among them being success.
‘You look gorgeous,’ Bill told her, for the eleventh or maybe for the twelfth time, and she noted, perhaps surprised, that he was entirely sober. ‘I know you hate all this. But I’m immensely grateful that you came.’
‘I don’t hate it,’ she said. She put her hand on his chest and reached up and kissed him on the cheek. ‘It’s a marvellous party,’ she said. Which was true.
There were inevitable, minor dramas. A drunken starlet locked herself in a lavatory and a guest from Chicago earned a bashful round of applause when he picked the lock with the pin of a borrowed brooch. Two good-looking young men vying for the lead role in a prison thriller fought in the garden for at least ten uninterrupted minutes without either landing a telling blow.
‘Stop it, for Christ’s sakes,’ implored a man in a white tuxedo with shoulders like Bill’s and a nose almost flat to his face. ‘They’re killing one another!’
The fight petered out in the laughter that followed as Julia absorbed the surprising knowledge that the heavyweight champion of the world possessed a sense of humour.
She thought of Martin Hamer, then. But then, she thought of Martin Hamer all the time. Hamer had met Gene Tunney in America and Tunney had been the heavyweight champion, once. Bill had been there, too, that sunlit day in an American gymnasium. In Martin’s heartbreakingly short life, this encounter had been one of the riches bestowed. He had lived very intensely. But very little of his life could have been measured in anything but terrible cost.
‘Don’t be sad, kid,’ Bill said. And it was Bill. It was not Good Old Bill. He must have read her thoughts.
‘You’re a lovely man,’ she said.
‘Then please try to love me,’ he said.
Did he really say that? She watched his broad back retreat through the throng and wondered whether to believe her ears. Their words had needed to be half shouted and cupped against the frenetic noise of a jazz quartet performing from an upstairs balcony. She had misheard him, surely, she decided, the squeal of an alto-saxophone solo forcing its tempo into her brain and tapping feet.
By five in the morning all but a reluctant caucus of guests had departed. A pretty blonde Julia knew as a singer of ballads played the piano from the open door of the den with astonishing skill. Her repertoire seemed limited to Sartie and Debussy, but Julia had never heard either composer played with such subtlety and finesse. Beyond Bill’s glass and concrete walls, the dawn was slowly arriving, subdued by a light but persistent falling of rain. A fan of candlelight splayed and flickered out from the den into Bill’s sitting room. The remaining guest sat there, sharing a table with Bill and Julia and explaining the problem he faced.
‘My dilemma is this,’ he said. He was a director in his late twenties with thinning hair that made him look older and he had Bill on retainer because a wunderkind reputation brought problems only experience could successfully deal with in Hollywood. ‘My dilemma is this.’
He’d done one thing right, in hiring Bill, Julia thought. But his dilemma was pretty depressing. He had been offered a three-picture deal by a cash-rich producer on the basis that the first feature reviewed well and at least broke even at the box office. Get the first one right, and he got carte blanche on the second and third. The problem was the specifics of the first picture. The story was formulaic. It was a Civil War drama with the usual, humdrum amalgam of death and heroism. And Audie Murphy had been chosen by the producer to play the lead. Murphy had been gifted Hollywood stardom by becoming the most highly decorated American soldier to fight in World War II. He had clearly been some kind of phenomenon on the battlefield. But he could not act. Any correlation between real and celluloid heroism existed only in the minds of movie people. Murphy, a sharecropper’s son from North Texas, seemed to sense this himself, in performances so stilted there was almost something poignant about their failure. He’d been brilliant in the one movie in which he simulated himself. But otherwise he was lost.
And Murphy wasn’t even the problem.
The producer had stormed into Hollywood with the usual gatecrasher credentials of money and energy and philistinism. His wealth came from the profits his auto-parts company was making from the reconstruction of Europe. He had met a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl in Milan and promised to make her a movie star. She had never acted in her life. She did not possess a word of English. She was sweet and heartbreakingly beautiful. And she was the balding director’s problem as the man sat and sulked and dawn reluctantly broke over the debris of Bill’s birthday party on an Easter morning in Laurel Canyon.
Julia was bored by it all. They were smoking cigars, the men, and she had loathed the smell of cigars since a series of forced encounters with a German doctor called Buckner in the labour camp outside the Polish city of Poznan a few years and a lifetime earlier. She had been up all night and was tired. She did not want to resort to the bottle of Benzedrine upstairs in Bill’s bathroom cabinet to restore her alertness. She wanted to be there when her daughter awoke in a couple of hours in a strange hotel bed. She wanted to be showered and changed by then into soft pyjamas, to brush her teeth and get into bed and cuddle Natasha awake. There was a car outside for her with a driver waiting at its wheel and the hotel was a forty-minute drive away on deserted dawn roads. But she could not leave without saying a proper goodbye to Bill, who was engrossed in his cigar and the dilemma faced in his de
but feature by the balding director. Self-obsessed, the director, Julia thought. But then they all were, the successful ones. And the ones who wanted properly to succeed.
In the den, the pretty blonde had fallen asleep over the piano lid. The only soundtrack now was the gurgle of water from the tiered stream in the garden. Julia took a Dunhill from a marble cigarette box on a table and lit it.
‘The scene where he departs for the war is the problem,’ the director was saying. ‘We need to see it through his eyes. He just doesn’t have the gravity for us to see him through hers and anyway, it throws the balance off. It’s more noble, his departure, seen from her perspective.’
‘Can she cry?’ This from Bill.
‘Anyone can cry with glycerine.’
‘Then you’ll just have to dub her.’
‘I know. Jesus.’
‘Why will you have to dub her?’ Julia said. ‘Is it not plausible for a soldier in 1860 to take an immigrant wife?’
‘Sure,’ the director said. He laughed. ‘It’s a nice take on the turbulent demographic of the period.’
Someone had been at the Benzedrine bottle.
‘Then what’s the problem?’
‘The problem is that she speaks no fucking English.’
Bill stiffened at the obscenity. Julia squeezed his shoulder. The director seemed not to notice. There were flecks of white, dried saliva at the corners of his mouth.
‘She wants him to go?’
‘Of course she doesn’t. But she sees the need. She appreciates his calling. Knows the crusade is just and so on.’
‘Then she could buy him some martial parting gift,’ Julia said. ‘Not say anything. Just give him some keepsake that demonstrates her approval of the cause and his part in it. He’s a cavalry officer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps a pair of field glasses.’
‘They’re in officers’ quarters in a Texas fort,’ the director said. ‘Where’s she gonna get fucking binoculars from? The fucking Sears and Roebuck catalogue?’
‘You’re a valued client, Tommy,’ Bill said. ‘But Julia is my guest. If you use language like that again in my house, you will be climbing out of the canyon.’
Julia sat down with them. She scrubbed out the last of her cigarette in their ashtray. The director had grown very pale. Bill was not, she knew, a casual maker of threats. ‘They’re in officers’ quarters?’
‘Yes.’
‘They have a scullery?’
He shrugged. ‘Yes.’
‘After he has gone to sleep on the night before his departure for the war, she takes his sword from its scabbard where he has left it, tied by his sword belt, to the bedpost. He awakens, but he does not stir. She takes the whetstone from the cutlery drawer in the kitchen and she sits and sharpens the sword. And then she very carefully, almost tenderly, puts it back. And surreptitiously, he watches her.’
‘No dialogue?’
‘Not a syllable.’
The director cleared his throat. ‘What do you do for a living, Julia?’
‘I’m a school librarian.’
‘Not anymore, you’re not.’
Bill dismissed her car and driver and drove her back to the Montmorency himself, through the quiet undulations of the canyon, then through the flat, mesa and cactus landscape, through the parched lake bed and arroyo-pitted earth. But for the odd, trundling truck, they had the roads to themselves. Bill had put the air conditioning on and Julia wrapped herself in the passenger seat in her short astrakhan coat. They were all the rage that season. She had spent a lot on her dress and her accessories. She had wanted to look elegant and graceful for him. He had done so much for her. And for Natasha. For both of them. Perhaps it was the terrain, but she was reminded of the first time she had shared a car journey with Bill, coming back from Mexico, bearing her child in her belly and her burden of grief. So much had changed since then. And so much would never alter.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘You usually know.’
‘Not today.’
‘That you’re much better like this, sober, Bill. That drink diminishes you.’
He smiled. She suspected very strongly that she was the only one who dared say this to him. She suspected, in a darker part of her, that she might be the only one who really cared. The party had been a big success and Bill was evidently very popular. But Hollywood struck Julia as a loveless place.
They pulled up outside the hotel. It was still very early on a bright morning. The pavement outside the hotel entrance had just been washed and smelled of Lysol. Young men in white tunics with blue piping and epaulettes rushed around the entrance with pails and brushes and mops and polishing cloths. It was a very energetic scene, full of American colour, Julia thought, and urgency. Bill wound down his window and already she could here the busy pop of ball on catgut from the tennis courts. There would be industrious swimmers, too, completing lengths of the hotel pool.
‘Drink doesn’t diminish people,’ Bill said. ‘It’s life that does that. Life diminishes us all.’
‘You stayed sober last night.’
‘Last night I felt undiminished. Relatively speaking, I mean. I did have a couple of drinks. But they were drinks of very modest dimensions.’
‘Don’t make fun of me.’
‘Maybe that’s the secret,’ he said. ‘Drink small drinks and you stay the same size.’
‘Don’t be angry, Bill.’
‘You’d better go in,’ he said, looking towards the hotel. ‘You have an appointment with someone very precious. If diminutive.’
‘Will you answer me something honestly?’
‘If I can. I’m a lawyer, remember.’ But then he seemed all at once to weary of his own forced levity. He looked at her and his expression was absolutely sincere. It could have been a special effort made out of gratitude for her help with the party. She didn’t want to think it was the obvious thing, the emotion most likely to compel his honesty.
‘Go ahead, kid,’ he said, gently. ‘What is it you want to know?’
It seemed odd to be asking him this, here. They had turned the hotel sprinklers on now and the rhythmic swish of water washed over the hoots of horns from the car port and the percussive sounds from the tennis courts and the pealing telephone bells in the Montmorency lobby.
‘Six years ago. When you came to Natasha’s christening. Do you remember?’
‘Barely.’
‘You’d been drunk for a week, hadn’t you?’
‘Longer,’ he said. ‘Three, I think.’
‘Why?’
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘The first time I saw my daughter, it was in the hospital. She was in one of those glass cases they put Natasha into when she was born. The last time I saw her, to say goodbye, was also in the hospital. And it was under the glass of an incubator then, also. Hannah wasn’t quite two and a half when scarlet fever took her from us.’
‘Oh, Bill—’
Bill looked at Julia. ‘We were very grateful for her life. But within eighteen months her death had taken her mother, too.’ He took one huge hand off the wheel and made it into a fist and looked at it. ‘We keep those things we’re not equipped to deal with hidden,’ he said. Then he laughed and reached across where Julia sat and pushed open the passenger door. ‘I didn’t realize how diminished I’d be, seeing the inside of a children’s hospital again. That’s all.’
He kissed her on the cheek, then, and said, ‘You should consider Tom Sweeney’s offer. That was his instinct talking, not the uppers. I don’t think he’s ever going to give Houston or Welles sleepless nights. But he’s right about you. You could do very nicely here.’
Julia got out of the car and closed the door.
‘Thanks for making it a swell party,’ Bill said to her through the open window. He started up the engine and he drove away.
Three
He was in the port of Danzig when the end came, when the surrender was declared and the world descended on Germany in
judgement and its righteous hunger for retribution. He no longer wore a uniform by then. Only boys by then wore uniform. And the streets of the port were full of them. They lay everywhere, the corpses. Hitler Youth diehards killed in patriotic clusters manning obsolete guns. In some places their bodies had been scattered and burnt by the allied firebombs, or shattered by the Soviet artillery assault that had levelled the city. Some were not uniformed but naked, stripped of everything by the conquering Russian troops. For perhaps the first time in his life, Landau was glad that he wasn’t a better specimen of German manhood. Unprepossessing and thin, he wandered through the port with an impunity by no means guaranteed by a suit of civilian rags and tatters. He saw the executed bodies in Danzig of dozens, scores of German non-combatants. It was enough provocation for the Red Army for their victim to be a capitalist, a German, and even, Landau supposed, a male. You needed luck and timing and an appearance so wretched it couldn’t provoke anger or greed. He had mastered this. You also needed never to come across the Russians when they were drunk. This was mostly where the luck came into the art and craft of survival.
He had chosen a port as soon as he had made the decision to desert. But any ideas he had about escape from Germany had proven to be hopelessly naïve. He’d stayed off the roads and walked the shattered railway tracks by night to get to his destination. Pillars of smoke over the city, rising to a mournful pall, hinted at what to expect when he got there as he rested up by day in hides in the embankments and cuttings and beside the broken canal bridges along the route. He survived during this time on what scant supplies he could unearth from the defeated land. From the defeated dead. And he stole what there was to steal when he came across refugees weaker than he was. He took no pride in doing this, but neither did he feel ashamed. Like his country he was numbed, inured to feeling. He was stripped, like certain scavenging animals, of all the senses and sensibilities but for those upon which self-preservation depended.
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